Arrowlite work

Thank you for your comments!

Here’s the “tools” I came up with while doing the work on the taillight buckets and rims. These were suggested to me by Greg Long and I would have preferred to make them in metal but I no longer have access to a machine shop so the books are oak and ash. A little crude but I was able to do a lot with them

The first block fits the inside contour and is cut so there is clearance for the lip at the opening, the second one was carved out to support the face radius of the rim, and the bottom one fits the outside contour of the bucket. I also made up some punches from hardwood dowels to fit different contours and use to rub out the brass, they wear out quickly but are easily made. The push-punch and drift punch were slightly rounded at the end for very small sharp dings and the screwdriver was also ground to a radius for using to rub the brass into the wood blocks to remove any creases. The brass wire piece was set on the internal contour block for working kinks out from the ridge. The inner and outer blocks could also be used with a c-clamp to remove the larger dents. If I had access to CNC equipment I could have included the ridge and outer flange contour to these and they would have been a lot smoother to use.

The brass used for the taillight parts would quickly work harden and needed to be annealed several times while working the brass especially on the larger denting. I also annealed each piece after the soldering as best as I could without melting the soldered patches I showed above.

Hopefully this will help others out, I pretty much made it up as I went along as there doesn’t seem to be any books on restoring cracked spun brass items.

Brass is annealed by quenching. I used a propane torch and heated them to a dull red which appeared to chase the flames and turn dark, then very quickly quenched them in a half full 5 gallon bucket of ice water. You would think this does something to the plating but it was surprisingly fine after a quick polish.